


everywhere on earth you go

by misandrywitch



Series: that's not music you hear that's the devil [1]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Canon Disabled Character, Folk band AU, folk band au electric boogaloo, oblique references to the thing that jesse manes does to michael that's awful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:24:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21647281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: Across the room, he can still see how Michael Guerin is looking at him. And that’s something different, something new, something so very familiar. The thrill of nerves, of guilt, of want.Alex smiles, and he starts to sing.(OR: Alex Manes grabs his guitar and gets the hell out of Roswell in 2008, and he leaves behind a letter. Here's what happens ten years later)
Relationships: Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Series: that's not music you hear that's the devil [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1576177
Comments: 65
Kudos: 207





	everywhere on earth you go

**Author's Note:**

> WELCOME TO FOLK BAND AU 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO
> 
> i like what i like and i cannot be stopped. email me never. i have enough evidence to make this particular stretch because i know what john darnielle used to dress like as a teenager. alex doesn't necessarily write an album like 'the sunset tree' but he also doesn't.... not... do that. you're hip to my jive.
> 
> the title is from the bob dylan tune ['when i get my hands on you'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDUDx15KdkI) \- which is best listened to on the new basement tapes recording with marcus mumford, rhiannon giddens, elvis costello & taylor goldsmith. it's also the song michael plays on the guitar in the back of the truck. 
> 
> everywhere on earth you go, gonna have me as your man... 
> 
> also, the shirt alex is wearing is [THIS SHIRT](https://actualpain.myshopify.com/products/long-live-death-unisex-black-tee) \- which can be purchased if you're so inclined. do with that what you will. 
> 
> i'm leescoresbies.tumblr.com please tell me you love me

  
  


"I hold with the Gnostics, who say there are two Satans, and one can't help you, and he's bad, and he's the cause of illness and disease and pain. And the other is he that resists, he that stands against those who would hold you back, and the pain that would keep you from advancing. And that is who we will now worship."

\- John Darnielle, about _The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton_

  
  
  
  
  


There’s a reason why Alex Manes doesn’t play shows in New Mexico. 

It’s his own rules, unwritten but strictly enforced over the last decade. He knows a lot of people with complex and detailed pre-show superstitions, sometimes even written into riders and contracts. Chamomile tea. No red M&M’s. Forty minutes of warm-up exercises meant to encourage throat lubrication. Calisthenics. Meditation. Three rounds of solitaire. He tends towards black eyeliner, deep breathing, a little good whiskey - and a particular avoidance of geography.

That’s not superstition, though. It’s good sense. Usually, Alex has good sense in spades - with just enough seat-of-the-pants unpredictability to keep things interesting. 

Today though, he’s missing one and drowning in the other. And he’s sure it’s because he broke his rule. And also because the drummer he’s hired is a moron - a fact that’s not unconnected from the geography either. 

He’s got a gig, meant to start any minute. A missing percussion section. Engine grease on his knuckles. And a headache.

“I don’t know where the drummer is,” Alex - sweaty, disheveled, trying really hard to tune his guitar - snaps at a short man with a clipboard who is shouting about _ six minutes til _ and _ sold out crowd. _

“He’s in the bathroom,” the guy waves the clipboard in Alex’s face. They’re standing in what’s passing badly for a greenroom - a little room that smells like cheap beer and socks - and Alex is meant to be onstage in six minutes and he has no idea where his drummer is. The bathroom, apparently.

“Well,” Alex is trying to be polite, he makes a point to be polite with people he works with because it makes life easier for everyone later but right now it’s very hard, “get him out of the bathroom.” 

“He’s locked the door.” 

“Then get out of my way.” Alex shoves past him into the back hallway, taking his guitar with him. He’s beginning to wonder if it’ll walk off if he turns his back on it. 

He hadn’t exactly planned to spend the forty minutes before his set alternating his time between peering under the hood of the clunky white van he’s been saddled with riding around in for the last week, and chasing down its owner who is - coincidentally - also supposed to be ready to go onstage and hit a percussive instrument in something resembling a rhythm. 

He hasn’t pulled it off well so far exactly, in the four shows Alex has played with the guy. And Alex isn’t exactly an optimist. Still, hiring the drummer had been a favor - he’s a friend of a cousin of Maria DeLuca’s, or something - and he’d asked about a few tour dates in Texas before casually dropping he knew the guy who did the booking at Meow Wolf. Alex isn’t indie enough or paranoid enough to pass up an opportunity for a free in at Meow Wolf. So they’d done that two days ago in Santa Fe, and then the drummer had mentioned this venue owned by another friend of a friend, and wouldn’t Alex mind doing one more gig in Albuquerque? Small place, really not a big deal. The people who run it know his name. They’re fans. 

Ordinarily, Alex would have said no and gotten himself the fuck out of the state of New Mexico as fast as possible. But Alex has a secret soft spot for that kind of thing, even after ten years in the business. And Meow Wolf had been fun. So sue him. 

The shit splatters the fan the minute they reach the Albuquerque city limits. It’s like the universe can sense Alex’s own proximity to the place he grew up, and has something to say about it that starts with an F and contains four letters. The drummer’s ugly white van had started belching smoke on the highway. They’d trundled into the parking lot of the venue, late, going thirty miles under the speed limit. The drummer had admitted, sheepishly, that he hadn’t had the engine checked over before he’d gotten on the road, meaning Alex has been riding around in a glorified death trap for the last week, nor does he have any idea how to fix it. 

And now he’s missing. 

Alex pounds on the bathroom door once or twice with his fist, and hears someone moving around inside. A good sign. He pounds again.

“Hold on, bro!” That’s the drummer. Alex opens his mouth to yell back but someone grabs his elbow, which makes him jump. It’s the woman who runs the bar in this hole, little and dark-haired. She’s holding a ring of keys. 

“Let’s just unlock it,” she says, and for the first time in his life Alex has the urge to kiss a woman full on the mouth. 

“You’re saving my ass,” he says gratefully. 

“Listen,” the woman says, as she shoves the key into the lock, “it’s your van smoking in the parking lot, right? I just called this friend of mine who’s a mechanic, always fixes shit around the bar. Want him to look at it? Doesn’t look good.”

“It’s not my van,” Alex says. The lock clicks. “I’m just riding around in it. That’s a nice offer, though. Let’s ask its owner.” 

He throws the door open with a little more force than necessary. The drummer, bent over the closed toilet lid, jumps a little guiltily. 

“Bro,” he says, “I said hold on.” 

“We’re supposed to be playing a show,” Alex says wearily, with the full context of exactly what this idiot’s locked himself in the bathroom to do. 

“Right,” the drummer nods, rubs his nose. “A show. Right.” 

“And this nice woman knows someone who can fix your van.”

“My van. Right. What’s wrong with it?” He blinks. And something in Alex gets a little closer to snapping. He takes a deep breath - in through the nose, out through the mouth, cyclical breathing meant to address anxiety - and the feeling hasn’t gone away. 

“You know what?” he says, decisively, “never mind. And never mind the show.”

“Bro, what does that mean?” 

“Means you’re fired,” Alex says. 

“Bro!”

“Not your brother. Have a good one,” Alex says, and smiles, and slams the bathroom door shut. 

This is why Alex doesn’t play shows in New Mexico. Something always seems to go wrong when he comes back here. 

The beginnings of a migraine are building in his temples as he shoves himself back through the bar, through the door that cuts into a hallway leading backstage, and into a knot of anxious, irritated people all looking at their watches. 

“We have to start this,” the man with the clipboard says from near Alex’s elbow. “Are you playing? What’s going on?”

“I’m playing,” Alex snaps back, trying to shift his guitar around on his shoulder in the crowded hallway. Strings twang in protest. He’ll have to re-tune it onstage. 

“If you’re really worried about the van, my friend is here,” the woman who runs the bar - Kathy? Katie? Something with a K that’s vanished right from Alex’s head in the mess even though usually he’s pretty good with names - calls this from the doorway. “You want him to look at it?” 

“It’s not my van!” Alex shifts the guitar again, trying to protect the strings from more damage. His head hurts. His leg hurts. The opposite hip hurts more. “Will one of you get me a chair? A stool? I’ll need it onstage.” 

“What about your drummer?” Clipboard man is even more insistent now. “What are we supposed to do, exactly? We spent all this time on a sound setup - and you’ve got to be onstage now - “ 

“I’m gonna do what I always do,” Alex says, patiently as he can. “A stool. I need a stool. I don’t care about the van.” He clutches at the guitar, unmoored. The press of people all staring in his direction is kicking up the kind of low-grade panic he hasn’t waded through daily since he was eighteen and nineteen, newly on his own and always looking over his shoulder. 

“But your drummer - “

“I fired my drummer,” Alex says. “He’s doing coke in your bathroom, by the way. Might want to wipe down the toilet seat. Plausible deniability.” 

“You fired him?” 

“Does he need a mechanic for the van?”

“I went to college with that guy!” 

“And he sucks,” Alex tries to get past, can’t. “I need a drink. A stool. I need you to move so I can get onstage and get this over with.” 

“What do I do with the drumset, then? Or his van?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“He owes me money - and he’s my friend - “

"Fuck the drummer!" Alex yells, his nerves and his temper and his cool all balancing on a fraying wire's edge that's one more bad turn away from tumbling into a maelstrom meltdown of a smashed drumset and a drunk and disorderly. "Fuck his van, and fuck your fucking mechanic friend while I'm at it!" 

"I mean," a voice behind Alex says, "you're suggesting it. Not me." 

A new voice, in all the nonsense cacophony. A drawl, that New Mexico twinge that's not really an accent but centers the speaker as bring from the Southwest, noticeable only to people who leave it and get nostalgic once in a blue moon. It sets Alex’s teeth even further on edge. 

Alex whirls around, incensed, even as someone yells over his shoulder that he's meant to be onstage right now. He opens his mouth to snap something about getting thrown out of the venue without a refund, and then closes it again. The words die. His jaw works on empty air for a long moment and the idiotic facts of the evening all tilt sideways into insignificance because he knows the face looking back at him from under the brim of a black cowboy hat. He'd know it anywhere. Even now.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Alex manages. 

"Not my name," Michael Guerin smirks at him, his face illuminated by bad bar backlighting like a beacon. "But with a face like that, you can call me whatever you want."

"Guerin," Alex says. It's the only thing he can say. He's toppling through time and location and a gangly kid with a wicked head of hair is grinning at him over bar chords.

"Ah, there it is. He does remember," Michael says. His mouth is clever and his eyes are harder than Alex remembers.

"I have to be on stage," Alex says, stupidly. He wants to ask what Michael is doing here. He wants to ask how it is that he's caught him like this, with one look that feels like a come-on, a question, a cross-examination. He wants to ask how ten years can feel so long. "Like, thirty seconds ago."

"Yes," Michael says. He raises his eyebrows. 

"I also screamed fuck in your face."

"Couple times." 

"I'll buy you a drink about it."

Michael's eyes are amber and liquid. "You have to be on stage," he says. "Thirty seconds ago."

"After." Someone is yelling Alex's name with real anger now but he feels he has to say it. He hefts his guitar, makes impossible eye contact. "Don't move."

Then he sprints for the wings and makes it to the green room door only four minutes after he was actually meant to begin the show. He pushes his hair flat with a palm, wipes under his eyes to smudge liner. Not bad - considering the circumstances. Takes a deep breath, in and out and through and finds that center, that certainty he can always call on. Him and his guitar and an empty stage.

Alex grins, and he walks through the green room doors and onto the stage.

There’s probably a point, two or three or four decades in, when he’ll get used to taking that step and seeing a room full of people looking up at him expectantly, waiting for what he’ll do next. Alex hasn’t found that point yet. Good or bad or indifferent, they’re waiting to see who he is, and it’s up to him to tell them. The rest of the bullshit peels aside to leave those two facts; them and him. Alex and his guitar. A meteorite could hurtle through the ceiling and it would still be no more complicated than that. 

He’s been in rooms that were all but empty, and rooms full of hecklers and homophobes, and rooms where everybody was just waiting for him to hurry up and move on so they could see the act they really care about. And a few good ones. More than a few, by now. Those are just details. 

“Good fucking evening, everybody,” Alex says, into the mic. The crackle of feedback. Behind him someone is actually putting a stool onstage. He might need it later but right now his leg doesn’t hurt at all. “I don’t really play shows in New Mexico, so it’s kind of special to be here with all of you tonight.” 

The faces in the crowd are mostly a blur, the press of a crowd in a dark room. Alex can see all the way to the bar on the far wall. His eyes are drawn there like to a neon beacon in a sunless sea, searching for shadows and shapes he knows. He knows this one. The slope of shoulders and a tangled head of hair, a man holding a hat against his chest with one elbow against the bar counter. Alex sees him clearly in the crowd, in the dark. 

Michael Guerin always had that effect on him, standing out in Alex’s mind even when it was inconvenient, or dangerous. 

Alex takes a deep breath. His fingers find the strings. 

“Any of you ever have the kind of day that starts like a mess and ends like a trainwreck?” He asks, into the mic. “That’s been mine. I hope you’ll all forgive a little change of plans. My name’s Alex Manes. I’m going to sing you a few songs. How does that sound?

Murmurs, applause. There’s a rhythm to this, just like everything. Alex closes his eyes for a second, finds the moment of peace behind his closed lids, and then opens them. 

Across the room, he can still see how Michael Guerin is looking at him. And that’s something different, something new, something so very familiar. The thrill of nerves, of guilt, of want. 

Alex smiles, and he starts to sing. 

* * *

People doing interviews tend to ask the question about halfway through something they envision as a cutting profile piece. _ Where’d you get your start? _they ask. Some variation of that, anyway. Alex has a few answers, because it’s a stupid question really and there isn’t just one hard line that made him want this. For real music junkie publications, he usually talks about Buffy Sainte-Marie and John Darnielle or Gerard Way, and laughs at his own teenage affinity for emo-leaning pop punk. If it’s a dry conversation, or going badly, he talks about the importance of funding music education in middle and high school. If he really likes the reporter, he’ll mention his mom. 

“She got me my first guitar,” he says, “when I was nine. I grew up watching her play. She loved it, so I loved it. Never did anything with it herself, but I kept loving it for that reason.” 

He doesn’t mention knowing what she dreamed of calling her own rock band when she was sixteen, and how she’d laugh ruefully and drum her short nails on their kitchen table while his older brothers crashed through other rooms in the house with Nerf guns, yelling for their dad to come see. He doesn’t mention how quiet the house was in the evenings after she left for good, taking the melodious strumming with her. How he’d chased something to fill that silence, the euphoria of discordant chords in his headphones and later coming out of his own instrument. How that had felt like a distilled brand of his own anger and fear and restlessness. How he’d understood his mother better, and been furious with her. That’s not the kind of answer anybody’s looking for. 

Any of those can explain where he started. But there’s a second step to the story, the question he doesn’t really get asked. 

How did you know for sure that you’d make it? 

Shivering in the back of a bus with just his guitar and a backpack and his own determination, sure. His first check, first contract, first tour poster with his name on it. Watching Maria cart a shoebox full of cards and well-wishes from strangers into his hospital room, laughing as she read them out loud. Sure enough. 

Really though - it started like this. 

Late New Mexico winter that wanted to be spring but wasn’t yet. His dad’s toolshed, tucked into the corner of the two-acre lot on the edge of town. Usually locked, unless Alex left it unlocked on purpose. Someone else’s hands around his older brother’s guitar. Square nails, the rise and fall of collarbones as he played. The buzz of the strings in the concave hollow between Alex’s ribs. The sound coalesced into a song he knew. He closed his eyes, hummed a few bars, sung a few more. The hands playing the guitar paused for a second, almost in surprise. 

“You sound good.”

“Ah, whatever.” Alex didn’t open his eyes. When he did the hush would lift and he’d be back where he always was, the odd one out two seconds from being laughed at. Or worse. 

“I’m serious. Better than most of the shit on the radio.” 

“Don’t you just listen to country music?” 

“The dial in my truck is stuck okay? And you sound better than that shit, so there.” 

“I mean,” Alex swallowed. Stared at the ceiling instead of the boy next to him. He was too aware of the shape of his body, and how close together they were sitting, knees and elbows and the hard edge of the guitar. “I’m just singing somebody else’s song.”

“Does that mean I’m gonna hear you sing one of your own songs?” 

Alex searched for condescension there, didn’t find any. “Maybe someday,” he said. 

Michael Guerin looked at him. Evaluating. It felt strange to be looked at without the kind of judgment, the weight, that usually came with scrutiny.

“That means you write ‘em, right?” Michael said, still strumming. 

Alex almost resented that, having his private yearning put on the spot so casually. It happened a lot, really, but fielding inane jokes about blowjobs became rote after a while. This was even more private than that. If it were anyone else, he’d strike back twice as mean. But he liked how Michael was honest, almost blunt with it. 

So he cleared his throat instead, even as his heart was hammering. “Sometimes I do,” he said. “It’s what I, you know, what to do. Or whatever. Get out of this town. Make music.” 

“You should,” Michael said that decisively. “Get the hell out of here. Do something big.” 

“That’s what you’re gonna do?” 

“Yeah,” Michael said. He hit a G chord, triumphant, and grinned. “Something big. Get out of this town. Make money. Discover a new planet. Whatever I want. Like you’re gonna do what you want.” 

If it were anyone else, Alex might have thought he was being mocked. He didn’t. Michael’s eyes were bright and purposeful. Alex wanted to kiss his grin, his neck, his knuckles. Overwhelmed by the want, he turned his face towards the window to look outside. Just in case. 

“Play something else I know the words to,” he said. Michael did, tripping over his fingers once or twice and playing right through the mistakes like they didn’t matter. The music filled the room and the space between them, wall to wall to locked door. Warm and safe with late-arriving spring outside, Alex tipped his head back and sang. 

Alex always came back to that in his head, years later. One fleeting moment of absolute certainty; he never forgot how that felt. The surety of being understood was dizzying. Months before Michael had touched him, he’d already upended everything Alex thought he knew about intimacy. 

He’d been a kid. He didn’t know anything about anything. Not really. But still - it had counted for a lot. 

That’s the real answer. But it’s not one he can give to anybody, exactly. Nobody else would really understand. He hadn’t exactly ever expected to see Michael Guerin again. 

  
  


* * *

Alex does an encore. Then a second one, for shits and giggles, trotting out a few B-sides just to see if anybody in the crowd will recognize them. Nobody does really, but that’s alright. Eventually he’s not-so-subtly motioned off and he goes with a wave. 

There’s a rhythm to ending a show like there is to starting one, and Alex makes himself walk through it even though he’s suddenly unbearably nervous. He drinks a whole glass of water, stretches his hands, puts his guitar away before he lets himself think about consequences. The clusterfuck with the van, the drummer - the fact that he’s essentially stranded in Albuquerque and will have to keep his fingers crossed he can catch a flight back to Austin tomorrow. The patina of anxiety that’s been lingering since the beginning of the month that drove him, impulsive, to agree to play these shows in the first place because in a week or two it’ll be ten years on the dot since he shoved most of his belongings into a backpack and told Mimi DeLuca he’d call if it came to that. Impulsivity, right down in his bloodstream. And that familiar face. This week, this year, this place. 

Alex wonders if Michael will actually be there. He’s not sure if it’s better if he is, or worse. 

The room is emptying out when Alex pushes the door open. Wearing a different jacket and a hat, nobody looks at him twice. He’s not really famous enough to get recognized outside of the Austin music scene, and that’s usually by bearded kids in health food stores. Even so, he only really likes doing the sign-and-shake-hands song-and-dance on his terms. Another night, he’d head out the back and get out of here. 

But there’s a familiar shape at the bar. 

Michael turns when Alex approaches and stops, mouth open for a moment. They stare at each other. 

“Michael Guerin,” Alex says, to say something. “Holy shit.”

“Alex Manes. I’ll be damned.” Michael’s mouth forms his name like it means something else. “You ditched the, uh,” Michael waves his hand down the length of Alex’s body and those facts have to arrange themselves in order in the adrenaline thrum of Alex’s brain: Michael Guerin; Michael Guerin’s hand; Alex’s body. “The head-to-toe black getup. Surprised to see you wearing a color.” 

“Sometimes I even wear more than one,” Alex says, mouth on autopilot. “I’m really branching out, me. You’re still here.” 

“You told me not to move.” 

Alex shakes his head, suddenly overwhelmed. “This wasn’t some kind of bizarre flashback brought on by the fact that my drummer’s doing coke in the bathroom and I’m stressed to hell.” 

“Your drummer’s doing coke in the bathroom?” 

“Well, he was.” 

Michael lifts his hat, knocks his knuckles against his own skull. His left hand. Alex tracks the movement and he knows what he’s going to see even before the details settle. Michael’s hand hadn’t healed well. His left pinkie finger is crooked, his knuckles uneven and scarred. That most of all makes Alex fix himself in place and time, in the here and now. The last time he’d seen Michael, his hand had been wrapped in white gauze. 

“Real as ever,” Michael says. He sets his hat back down. 

“Yeah,” Alex says. “Sorry - I just - “ he pushes his own hand across his face, trying to get ahold of himself. “This is so weird.” 

“I know it’s been a while,” Michael says wryly, “but most people I know kind of expect to run into me in shitty bars like this.” 

That thought makes Alex’s skin prickle, suddenly wondering who else he might run into in this day of unlikely coincidences. He fights the urge to look over his shoulder. 

“It has been a while,” he says, painful and obvious. Offstage, his words always reduce to rehearsed observations and inelegance. Particularly when it matters. Alex has the impression that this matters. “Let me get you a drink, or - “ he falters because Michael is looking at him - “I did yell at you, and you did offer to fix that idiotic van so I owe you one.” 

“You owe me one,” Michael repeats. He nods. “Alright. Go on, then.” 

“What do you like?” 

“Whiskey,” Michael says, automatically. 

“Man after my own heart,” Alex says, and then understands as he turns towards the bar that was either an incredibly stupid thing to say, or a very honest one. 

The bartender serves them whiskey and ice, and Alex tries to look like he isn’t collapsing onto the bar stool as he sits down, and mostly succeeds. Adrenaline has always buoyed him right through live shows and well into the night afterwards but since the accident, he finds that he hits a wall of exhaustion if he’s not careful. He gives himself a moment to check all four corners of the emptying back room. He marks exits, scans faces. Old habits. When the bartender slides him a glass he jumps, then covers it. 

“Cheers,” Michael lifts his and Alex does the same. “You were good up there. Are good. I always knew you would be.” 

“Thanks,” Alex says, sincerely. “Kind of felt like a complete idiot. Getting close to thirty was supposed to mean my days of stumbling unprepared onstage at the last minute were behind me. But, really. That’s nice of you to say.” 

“I liked it,” Michael says, and swallows whiskey. “You only looked a little like a deer in headlights. High school talent show.” 

“Okay,” Alex says, “thanks for, you know, keeping an eye on my ego.” 

“My name’s not on the tour poster.” 

“This isn’t a tour, and there’s no poster. It was a favor. Now it’s a headache.” 

“Because of the drummer.” 

Alex sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose. “He’s some second cousin of my friend Maria and I said - it doesn’t matter what I said. He’s a moron. And now I’m in Albuquerque with no way to get home. Or even to my hotel. So that’s great.” 

Michael frowns at him. “Like, Maria DeLuca? That Maria?” Alex nods his assent. “He seemed kind of - “

“White? Yeah, I know. I didn’t ask for specifics.” The whiskey burns pleasantly in Alex’s throat. “She’s gonna crack up when I tell her I ran into you. I mean, what are the odds?” 

“A man like you in a bar like this?” Michael smirks, shakes his head. “She’d probably be grateful I’ve moved on a different local watering hole. You keep in touch with her. With someone from back home.” That comes out as a statement, not a question. A little sarcastic. It stings. 

“Yeah,” Alex says, aware of the implications in that admission. There are times, over the years, he’d thought about asking after Michael Guerin’s whereabouts. But saying it out loud had felt too concrete, like attention drawn from the universe to damage already done. And it had been easier to forget. “You go back to Roswell?” 

“Max and Isobel, you remember them? They both still live there,” Michael says. “I’ve been in Albuquerque for the last few years.”

“Do you like it?” 

“It’s a place,” Michael shrugs. “Tried Santa Fe, hated that. Las Cruces was okay. Tucson, pretty cool. Denver, too expensive. Never got too far from home base though. I’d miss the little green alien heads. Where are you living?”

“Austin,” Alex says, “last few years. But it feels like I’ve basically lived everywhere but New Mexico since I left.” 

“Right,” Michael says. “Since you left.” 

He looks away, which gives Alex the chance to study him for a long moment without being watched while he does it. He’s grown up, and into some of the things that had been there in his teenage years and other that haven’t. His features had been handsome in stillness but almost clumsy in motion as a kid, and Michael had always been moving. Now the line of his jaw is firm and distinctive. His nose has been broken at least once. He’s set his hat on the bar counter, following those unwritten rules about cowboy hats indoors Alex had never understood. 

Alex had always wondered where he’d end up. 

“Of all the gin joints in the world, right?” Alex says into the silence. 

“That’s what they say,” Michael says. “Never believed it. ‘Til now. Before you get ahead of yourself, I didn’t actually know you were gonna be playing here when I showed up tonight.”

“No, sure,” Alex says, quickly.

“And it took me a minute to realize that, yeah, Katie was talking about the same Alex Manes from Roswell High that I - “ Michael frowns, “knew, you know.” 

Knew. A useless word, and a descriptive one. “Well,” Alex says carefully, “here I was worried that there’s another gay, indigenous folk punk musician named Alex in the scene.” 

“I’m not stalking you, is what I’m saying,” Michael says, and Alex thinks he might grasp at what he’s getting at. This wasn’t orchestrated. He lifts his glass.

“Well,” he says, “I’ll drink to coincidences.” 

Michael looks at him, evaluating. Then he lifts his own glass, clinks them together. “Sure,” he says. “To small fucking worlds.” 

In this circumstance, Alex will drink to that.

“Is it a total cliche to ask what you’ve done in the last ten years that’s got you dressing like a desperado?” Alex asks, wiping his mouth. 

Michael laughs, tipping his heads back. That sound is familiar, a warm, pleased with himself sound. “Right after high school I was a ranch hand for a while,” he says. “Ditched the job pretty fast, kept the hat. People dig the belt buckle.” He points at his own waist. 

The belt buckle is huge, and silver. It looks impractical. “People,” Alex says. “I mean, some people must.” 

“A no from you?” 

“Guess I’ve never really considered it.”

“Coming from the guy wearing a shirt that says, uh,” Michael peers at Alex’s chest, and flips the lapel of his jacket over with one hand to read better, “_ Long Live Death.” _

Alex shrugs, trying to ignore the impact of that fleeting contact. “You can take the kid out of the bad home,” he says, “but you can’t get the goth out of the man.” 

Michael laughs at that, a little too loud and a little kooky like it had always been. And Alex relaxes a little. 

“So, you were a ranch hand,” he says. “Very Brokeback Mountain. What else?”

“You want the highlights?” Michael props his elbow on the bar. “Or a play-by-play? Not all of us get writeups in _ Rolling Stone, _so I’ll indulge you.” 

“_ Rolling Stone _is a rag,” Alex says with distaste. “And that was just once.” They’d called the newest album “elegant and eccentric” in the same paragraph they said it brought about confusion and dread. It’s a tried-and-true sore spot that comes up at cocktail hour. 

Michael rolls his eyes, but then he does indulge him with the highlights. He’d stuck around in Roswell for a while longer than he meant to (that makes Alex’s stomach turn) and neatly dodges the question of why. Deferred his scholarship, worked odd jobs, caused a lot of self-professed havoc. Then he’d gotten bored of that, and gotten a four-year degree in two. Moved to Santa Fe for a job (boring). Lived out of a trailer in Denver (boring). Crashed on Isobel Evans’ couch for a few months (also boring). Currently, he’s three chapters into a PhD thesis on something to do with optical physics, which he picks up when he has new ideas and puts down again when he gets bored of it, which seems to be often - and fixing cars. 

“Optical physics,” Alex says, shaking his head. “I feel like you’re dumbing it down for me. I mean, I appreciate it, considering I didn’t graduate high school and I probably wasn’t going to pass physics then.” 

Michael smiles reflexively. “The research is about, uh, entropic nonclassicality, and quantum non-Gaussianity tests. Via beam splitting.” 

“Oh, sure,” Alex says. “Boring. How do you sleep at night?” 

“Mostly by yanking the parts out of engines and welding them back together.” 

That’s a vivid image. It all is, a particular trajectory of a life filled with details Alex hasn’t witnessed. Alex wants to eat them, those details. He wants to read them all in chronological order and knows that’s impossible because they’re background noise and texture, and saying that kind of thing out loud gets you looks and questions about your well-being. The effect is staggering and contradictory. He wants to blurt out questions and pull answers from the air as badly as he fears hearing them. He hasn’t been lonely, exactly, the last ten years. Sometimes he’s been the opposite of, friends and lovers and people in that in-between space Alex so often feels comfortable occupying. One live-in boyfriend serious enough to introduce to Maria, one other one who came close. 

But he’s never encountered the urge to crack somebody’s head open and peer inside, quite like this. Should be the kind of thing you only get one shot at. 

That’s almost poetic. He should write that one down. It’s easier than trying to explain what it feels like to watch Michael talk with his hands, wander the conversation in circles around the point and then grin as he waits for Alex’s response. 

“Seems like you’re doing alright,” Alex says. 

“Don’t sound so surprised” Michael says. “I mean, that was the good stuff. You want gritty details, you have to wait for my memoirs. I Was A Teenaged Dirtbag.” 

“Teenage runaway,” Alex points at himself. “Objectively worse. I actively chose it.” 

Michael inclines his head, considering him. Neon bar lighting follows the movement along his chin and Adam’s apple and collarbone. “To dirtbags,” he says, extends his mostly-empty glass in another mock-toast. It’s a little sarcastic, but not entirely. 

“And runaways,” Alex says, and drinks to that. 

* * *

It would be natural to divide the story of his own history into two chapters. Before, big capital letter, and After, with a clean split down the middle. There - the part of the story with the hard stuff that made him become who he really is. And here - the part where that all pays off. Good material for a concept album, right? 

But that leaves the space in between those two things, an implied catastrophe. 

And caught in the middle is this kid. Wide-eyed and steel-jawed, sitting in the back of the Roswell-Albuquerque bus with his collar buttoned all the way up. He’s got a backpack cinched tight around his shoulders, and he’s holding a guitar. He looks fragile at first glance, exhausted and beat to hell with a purplish bruise on the back of his neck. He’s gotten bad news. He’s had a bad week. He won’t graduate high school. 

And if you look long enough you see the grit there, in his expression. The kind that makes people dig their fingernails into something and do anything to hold on.

Alex has always just been digging his fingernails into something, and trying to hold on. A hundred iterations of that same thing, like a rhythm. Keeping his head down in high-school locker rooms. Letting Rosa Ortecho smudge cheap liner under his eyes. Climbing out a window to get to her funeral. Begging for chances to play in a hundred bars and clubs and underground showcases and venues, and getting turned down three times as often as picked up. A thousand stupid minimum-wage jobs. Crashing on his mom’s couch for three months. Telling himself that if this one didn’t pan out, he’d throw in the towel. Never actually throwing anything. Second verse, same as the first - and it never gets any easier. 

Here and there and then and now - before and after - are matters of geography and safety. Those can change.

What he’s a lot more sure of are the through-lines. 

  
  


* * *

Alex finishes his drink before he starts to seriously think about what the hell he’s going to do next. The conversation has been a momentary reprieve from the ridiculous logistical situation he’s allowed himself to get sucked into, but the closer he gets to having to leave the bar, the more pressing it is. He’s well beyond hitch-hiking to hotels or sleeping on park benches, less because of his age and more because he’s missing a foot these days. 

“No idea how I’m gonna get back to Texas,” he says, feeling like a real idiot. “I got a ride here, and I just fired my ride. Guess I’ll try to get a flight tomorrow. Or rent a car? Don’t even know where I’m staying tonight.” He can feel the impending headache coming back as he speaks. 

“Have the address?” 

Alex holds his phone out so Michael can read the hotel reservation details. “Wherever that is?” he says. “Didn’t book it.” 

“I’ll drive you over there,” Michael says, and knocks the watery dregs of his glass back. Alex feels the impact of that statement like a closing pinpoint, signaling the end of this conversation, this reconnection, this evening. Nostalgia hits him hard like panic, a familiar flexing of muscles. He’s felt this way before, about Michael before. When this ends it’ll be over. 

“That’d be great,” he says, “and maybe you want to, uh,” the words are filled with false bravado and Alex makes himself stay still, hold Michael’s gaze even as he wants to shift and divert, “help me raid the mini-bar? Rock-and-roll lifestyle.” He holds up one hand, devil horns with two fingers. 

“I heard you play tonight, remember?” Michael’s smiling, but something in his eyes is apprehensive too. Alex marvels at the fact that he can still read that there, after all this time. “Your secret’s out, Manes. There were no live bats on that stage, and not as much eyeliner as I remember. Hard to be threatening with an acoustic guitar.” 

“You’ve been picturing me in a death metal band?”

“Oh, totally.” Michael shrugs. “I mean, there were definitely rumors about you and Satan worship floating around back in the day. Figured you just turned that into a career.” 

That might be a joke, but it also might not be. Better than rumors of another kind, anyway. 

“Rock and roll is a state of mind,” Alex says, primly. “And rogue folk is a legitimate genre, thank you very much. I’ve fought that battle long and hard for a decade.” 

“Still, not as much screaming as I thought when I heard your name.” Michael inclines his head, and Alex sticks on that for a second, imagining it. Michael’s surprise, mirroring Alex’s own a few hours later. Had he been angry? Nervous? Did he expect Alex would even recognize him? “Anyway, I have a better idea. Unless you have a bedtime these days.” 

“I’m a grown-ass adult, Guerin,” Alex says. “Which means I usually drink two bottles of water, do some deep breathing exercises and call it a night at ten.”

“Can you make an exception?” 

“That depends on what I’m excepting. Still gay.” 

“Okay, asshole,” Michael shakes his head, smiling. His jaw softens, then sharpens again as he licks his lips. “Do you wanna go for a drive?” 

“A drive,” Alex says. “You gonna show me the sights? I have been to Albuquerque before, you know.” 

“Well,” Michael’s jaw sharpens again; he licks his lips. “Might know one or two that aren’t in the tourist guidebooks.” 

Alex shouldn’t be in New Mexico at all. 

“Alright,” he says. He swallows. He’s all over nerves, and he wants them to be elated but they’re a mix, a tangle. A live-wire of exposure. “What the hell? This day can’t get any stranger.” 

* * *

  
  


Alex had been the kind of kid with a plan, and then he’d been surprised. 

It wasn’t the kind of guidance-counselor-approved life plan that parents could trot out at book clubs, of course. Nor was it the implications caught in the enthusiastic handshake of the Air Force ROTC officer who stopped by Roswell High, always filled with compliments for Alex’s older brothers and a kind of fervent optimism Alex found nauseating. Had Alex’s father known them, he’d have been full of more ammunition for how Alex’s very existence was an affront to well-established family values. It was the implication of those plans that got him going, Alex’s final year of high school. Usually - anyway. He’d gotten more volatile after Flint had been posted in Alabama, and Alex had conveniently gotten a stupid part-time job in an effort to stay out of the house as much as he could. 

But in his head, Alex knew what he was going to do. A list: Keep his head low enough to avoid the worst of it. Keep enough of his soul intact to mean something. Get a shitty high school diploma. Turn eighteen. And then hit the ground running and never look back. 

He had a short-list of people he knew he’d hang on to. Maria and her mother, of course, and Rosa, and Liz. The ones he’d miss, the people who meant something. A pretty short list.

That date was a big red line in his head, and 17-year-old Alex knew in an inexorable way that there would be some kind of showdown between then and now, because what he wanted and what was expected were never going to line up. The fewer people in the line of fire, the better - and patience paid off. He had to believe that. 

He had a plan.

And then Michael Guerin had surprised him. 

And he’d paid for that. 

A choice that wasn’t a choice; a compromise that was more like a surrender. Fall in line, or pay for it. Alex had gotten used to that price. Until it had cost somebody else. 

He’d been presented with a brick wall and two options.

Alex had taken the third one. 

* * *

“I can’t believe you still have this truck,” Alex says. He has to slam the passenger door shut twice for it to stay closed, like he used to have to do ten years ago. He’d gotten hot onstage, shrugging off his jacket as he played, but the night air outside the bar is crisp so he does buttons up again. The drummer’s stupid white van is still parked at the far end of the parking lot. Alex has hauled his bag and his cane and his spare guitar and his mandolin he’d packed on a whim out of it, thrown everything into the back of Michael’s truck. He’s grateful Michael hasn’t asked about the cane. Or the mandolin. Really not death metal. 

“It’s still in great shape,” Michael says, “and the ones made after, like, 2006 just don’t run as well or as long. And uh - “ he shrugs as he buckles his seatbelt, “never got any good at actually spending money when I don’t need to. Old habits, right?” 

“Familiar feeling,” Alex says, and doesn’t explain that any further. “The radio still stuck on country oldies?” 

“I never heard the end of that one,” Michael rolls his eyes. “I hate this song, Guerin. I’m not happy if I’m not listening to wailing, Guerin. If I have to hear Garth Brooks one more time today I’ll slit my wrists, Guerin!” 

“I didn’t sound like that!” 

“Kinda did.” Michael flicks the radio on. Country. “I fixed that problem years ago, anyway.” 

“Good, then I don’t have to leap out of a moving vehicle.” Alex leans up to drum his fingers on the dashboard. On a whim, he spins the dial on the radio. It flickers through static, then hits classic rock. “Where the hell are you taking me, anyway?” 

“It’s a surprise, Manes.” Michael taps his fingers on the steering wheel; eight good digits, then two busted ones. 

“I don’t like surprises.” He tries not to sound defensive. 

For a moment, Alex thinks Michael isn’t going to say anything. Then he smiles, sideways. “Road, outside town. Good place to see the sky.” 

Alex takes in details. Michael’s hat sitting on the back of his head and his denim shirt rolled up above the elbows and the new, adult angle of his chin. He leans into the impulse until it hurts, heart suddenly going haywire. It would be easy to say no. It would be easy to draw lines. He’s certain he’s done damage already, read in the line of Michael’s chin and how he’s still looking at Alex sideways like he has to witness Alex’s answer in order to believe it. Could he, now, go back and pretend this night hasn’t happened? 

Maybe. Or maybe not. And that’s not what Alex wants. 

“Take it away, cowboy,” he says, and he turns the hand crank to roll the window down so chilly Southwest air sweeps into the truck with them as Michael drives. 

  
  
  


* * *

Michael wasn’t the first person to suggest, even as a joke, the idea of leaving Roswell in the dust for something better. That had been Rosa, of course, who always had a way of seeing right through the bullshit to the heart of things. 

“If you can play like that,” she’d said, one night when Alex and Maria and Liz had all been dicking around in the diner after closing and Alex had pulled out his guitar, “you use it for something that counts and get the hell out of this place.” 

She said this to him when Liz and Maria were distracted with something else, not listening. Alex looked in her face, one he’d known all his life and one that was changing into adulthood in a way that wasn’t easy for anyone. Her smudgy makeup hid the tired shadows under her eyes, and her mouth looked pinched and tired. But there was light in her expression as she looked back, thumped a hand on his knee. Brusque but comforting all at once, that was Rosa. 

“Not like I have anywhere to go to, even if I was good enough,” Alex said, deflecting. 

“Screw good enough,” Rosa shook her head, pulling away from him and back into herself. “Nobody thinks they’re good enough. The question is if you want to. You deserve a lot better than this place. You and me both, _ mano _.” 

Alex did. He wanted to with an almost fantastical desperation, spilling tall tales in his head as he crept out of his bedroom window at night to practice chords in the shed at the corner of their property. He wanted out and away - of course. But he wanted to make that mean something even more. 

So Michael didn’t put the idea in his head. Really, and Alex had felt stupid and lovestruck and naive even thinking it but it was true, he was the one reason Alex might have considered sticking around. 

But with most things, Alex’s father left his mark on that, and removed the possibility of choice. And two years later, Alex wrote a dedication in the liner notes of his first album on a real label, a physical token. 

_ For Rosa, _ it said, _ because she was right. _

  
  


* * *

Michael turns them down a side road north of the Albuquerque city limits. The city lights blur behind them, fading into the swell of hills and scrub brush. With that gone, the darkness is intense. Austin nights aren’t like that, not in the city. Neither were nights in L.A., or Seattle, or Portland, or Chicago, or Asheville. It’s not quite so absolute as the childhood nights he’d spend camping with his brothers and Kyle Valenti, flickering campfire light and the anticipation of waiting for the adults to fall asleep to really horse around. But it’s a little like that anyway. 

When Michael kills the engine, they sit there in silence for a long moment. Then Michael pushes his car door open, and smiles over his shoulder, and leaves the truck. 

Alex climbs out of the front seat, shoves the door twice to get it to close. He doubles back for his guitar, pulls it out of the case before walking around the back of the truck. He flips the tailgate down like an afterthought, the kind of muscle memory that doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. The ankle of his right leg makes a muffled metallic thump, even through his sock, when he bounces it off the bumper. 

“You gonna play me a set or what?” Michael leans against the tailgate, looking at him. 

“Secret session,” Alex says. “No, maybe just covers. I’ll play someone else’s songs for a while.” He strums, retunes, strums again. “Still not any good at getting my guitar to stay in tune.” 

“Give it here,” Michael says, and Alex passes it over without a second thought. Michael closes his eyes and fiddles with it, playing two-fingered, sliding up the strings. This far from the highway, the only sounds beyond guitar strings come from the wind rustling through low trees and high bushes, insects and distant birdcall. “You know, I lied when I said I thought you were in a death metal band.” 

"Hail Satan,” Alex says, straight-faced. 

“Might have looked you up, once or twice.” 

“You did?” Alex is taken aback by that, for some reason. “You know that on average artists only make, like, a tenth of a cent per play on Spotify, right?”

“Didn’t mean on Spotify, dick.” 

“My really old stuff’s not up there anyway,” Alex says. “You’ve got to torrent it.” 

“I’m saying I bought your first album,” Michael says, almost savagely. “You vanished from the face of the earth and then it just popped up in this record store in Santa Fe two years later.” 

And that’s the proverbial landmine Alex has been hopping one-footed around since this conversation started. Michael wants to pilot them both right into it, a collision course. Alex should fight him for control of the wheel. 

Instead, he just sighs. 

“I’ll reimburse you,” he says. “By rights, you should probably get some of the royalties from the third one too.” Alex had tried, for years, to write an album about home. He’d gotten there eventually. His first attempt was really an album about Michael. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

Alex shoves at the edge of the guitar, still in Michael’s lap. “Are you going to play me a song on that or what?” 

Michael pulls a face, but his fingers flicker over the strings anyway. “Careful what you’re asking for. I’m not any good, anymore.” 

“Assume you stole it for a reason. You always did.” Michael’s reasons had less to do with actually playing the guitar every time they had happened, and they both know it. “And, look. I’m never going to be a household name but I’ve played with one or few over the years. And the big secret I’ve learned is that everybody, no matter how iconic, always thinks they aren’t any good.” 

Michael shifts to pull his other leg the rest of the way into the bed of the truck, resting his back against the side so he’s angled towards Alex, two sets of knees and crossed ankles with the guitar in between them like a chaperone. “So it’s okay if I suck,” he says. 

“It doesn’t matter to me,” Alex says. “I want to hear you play, if you want.” 

Michael doesn’t move, and for a moment Alex thinks he won’t. And then, all at once, he adjusts the guitar on his lap, and then starts playing. An E riff. Alex recognizes it, after a second.

“Bob Dylan,” he says. Michael nods, his curls tumbling into his face as he watches his own hands, his brow creasing. 

When Michael hits the first verse, Alex closes his eyes and tips his head back and sings. 

The last few chords fade into the evening stillness, and then Alex’s phone buzzes in his pocket, still in range of a cell tower somewhere. Maria, asking about the show, and a few missed messages from Kyle from earlier. 

_ Your cousin sucks, _ he texts, making a mental note to berate and apologize to DeLucas plural tomorrow. Kyle, in appropriate best-friend slash beagle-godparent fashion, has sent both a customary image of Alex’s dog, and an inquisitive _ You fall off a stage or something bro? _

_ Right into the mosh pit that doesn’t exist, _ Alex texts back. _ Not dead. Weird day. _ He pauses before the next detail. _ Ran into an old friend. _

_ Ooooh please tell me that’s a euphemism, _Kyle responds, and Alex rolls his eyes. 

_ Unless you mean like your dad and then let me call 911. _

_ It isn’t your dad is it. _

_ Don’t be a dick, _ he texts back to that barrage, and opens the image instead. “Hey,” Alex flips his phone around, “want to see a picture of my dog?”

“You let me drive you out here to show me pictures of your dog?” Michael peers at the phone despite the derision in his voice. “Your dog wearing a little sweater with skulls on it. Of course.” 

“She gets cold,” Alex says, in her defense. “She’s elderly. Her name’s Buffy.” 

“Like, the vampire slayer?” 

“Like Sainte-Marie. You should know that one. If you don’t, Google it. It was that or Billie Joe, and she’s definitely a Buffy.” 

“You leave your dog behind when you go on tour?” Definitely derision there. Michael passes the guitar back Alex’s way, severing that thread. 

“I’m just supposed to be gone for a week,” Alex says, carefully. “And I haven’t toured much since - last two years. Just this summer, after the new record. But she came along. My friend Kyle’s staying at my place while I’m away this time.” 

The desire to shove himself in an uncomfortable bus, or even on an airplane, has been almost non-existent since the accident, a combination of logistics and a renewed scrutiny over something completely new. Alex had done ten shows out of town, and had come back home with the profound relief of knowing he could just play the four bars in Austin that he likes for a while. Until this week, anyway. 

“Don’t tell me,” Michael says, shrewdly, “that Kyle is also someone from high school you still talk to. Cause I remember a Kyle. Valenti, right?” 

“Yeah,” Alex says, “the same Kyle.” 

“Remember he was a dick to you,” Michael says, and his voice and his expression all tighten in dislike. “For a couple pretty specific reasons.” 

“You remember that.” 

“Hard to forget it.” 

“He was,” Alex phrases this carefully, wanting to laugh but aware of the expression on Michael’s face, “a dick to me. He’s grown up. He’s a doctor, at St. David’s in Austin.” 

“Oh, super for him,” Michael sneers.

“His dad, Sheriff Jim, he got really sick a few years go. We reconnected because of that.” Alex lets himself laugh a little, because it’s still funny.

What had really happened was that Alex had showed up in Roswell for the first time in years on Michelle Valenti’s invitation, skittish and tired and aware Jim was on his deathbed. He’d run into Kyle in the hospital, had the stilted conversation of two people who used to know each other really well but no longer do stuck in the same place for the same awful reason. They’d gotten hammered together, and commiserated together, and had one big blow-out argument, and then slept together. Somewhere in there, after Kyle’s apology and before Alex threw up on his couch and definitely while neither one had pants on, they’d ended up friends again. 

He doesn’t say any of that out loud, though. 

“Then you’re doing alright,” Michael says, mocking Alex’s words from earlier. “Your new album, your dog, your friend Dr. Valenti, your place in Austin.”

Alex doesn’t really know what to say to that, what kind of response Michael wants. Offstage, unexpected flows in conversation still trip him up, like uncomfortable honesty and being home with all the lights on. 

“Took a while to get to that point,” he says neutrally. “It wasn’t always easy. Sometimes it was pretty fucking awful.”

The wind gusts over the hills, growing colder. “But you did it,” Michael says, his face unreadable. That might be sarcasm; his voice is laced with it. Alex isn’t sure. 

“So did you. Didn’t you?” 

“I don’t know,” Michael says, and he thumps his elbow on the side of the truck. “I really don’t. As long as I don’t think too hard about it, sure. Life’s peachy. Picture perfect.” 

Alex doesn’t know what to say to that either. He watches Michael instead. The taillights throw red and yellow shadows over his features, catching under the heavy lids of his eyes and under his chin. 

“I had this rule about playing shows in New Mexico,” Alex says, and then feels silly. 

“Why?” Michael says. “Thought you were gonna see a familiar face?” 

“Yeah,” Alex says, and he hears Michael swallow, “but not yours. Yours I wouldn’t have minded.” 

“Why’d you break your rule?” Michael asks, softly. 

Alex sighs. The air smells like sage and dust, a late-night association with back roads and late nights. He and Maria and Rosa Ortecho had trundled down roads like these in the Ortecho family car on weekend nights when he was still lying and saying he was sleeping over at the Valenti’s, to smoke joints and play covers of songs by the Grateful Dead and Siouxie and the Banshees. He and Michael had done the same, riding in Michael’s truck without buckled seatbelts, for much better reasons. For a long time he hadn’t wanted to think about the good moments, because that meant wading through the mire of the bad ones. He’s getting better at it. 

“It’s been ten years,” he says, eventually. “That has to mean something. Right? Something significant? Ten years. Since Rosa died. Since I - “ 

“Skipped town?” 

Michael is looking at him. Since the night began that’s what he’s been doing, just looking at him. It makes Alex want to cry. 

“Left home,” he says, “is what I was gonna say. But that too.” 

“I always wondered,” Michael says, his voice distant, “where you ended up. If you’d ever come back, or bother to tell me. If we’d ever - “ he trails off into empty space. “I mean, you just - “

His sentences don’t have endings, and the implications bring a sudden flood of anger. The unspoken words there sting, and Alex doesn’t tend towards self-righteousness but he thinks that he’s earned it every now and then. 

“I what?” he snaps. 

“Left,” Michael says without hesitation, and that tips Alex over the edge of something white hot. For just a moment, he wants to scream. He catches the impulse, breathes in four, hold seven, out eight - for anxiety. 

“If you brought me out here,” he says, on the exhale, “to demand some kind of apology for that, you can drive me back into town right now and drop me off.” 

He feels steel in his jawline and hates it, like he hates the military precision of his voice. The breathing isn’t helping, really, but he makes himself count in his head anyway - in for four, hold for five six seven, out long on the exhale for six seven eight and he’s stuck, like he gets stuck, stuck right on the past and what that means, six seven eight - 

“Alex,” Michael says, and his voice is jarring and it breaks the rhythm. Alex gasps in air, his head swimming. He closes his eyes. Hangs on to the sound of Michael’s voice. “That wasn’t what I - “

“Then what?” His own voice sounds unreal, like it’s being fed through a distortion pedal. 

There’s the rustle of fabric and movement. “Look at me,” Michael says. Alex does. He’s moved to crouch in front of the tailgate so they’re at eye level. The headlights catch the texture of his hair in gold spirals. His eyes drop somewhere to the dust between their feet. “Is that what you want? Me to drive you back?” 

“We’re not kids anymore,” Alex’s throat feels like sandpaper. He looks at the truck’s headlights, the stitching in Michael’s jacket, the curve of his ear, the point right between his own eyebrows. “And it’s been a long time. I think this might have been a bad idea.” 

Michael’s mouth presses in on itself, a mean punctuation mark. “Nostalgia’s a bitch,” he says. 

Alex could’ve taken his anger, had even expected that. But he sounds flippant and annoyed, dismissive. So Alex’s breathing catches again. The cadence of this day has thrown him for a loop, the past catching up to him in an unsteady rhythm. Better to tear the stitches clear, he thinks, than suffer Michael’s dismissiveness. 

“Would you just spit it out?” he asks, abrasive. “Whatever you asked me out here to say. I know you weren’t planning it, I know but - there must be something. It’s been ten years. You’ve got something.” 

“Show you mine if you show me yours,” Michael says, and Alex wonders where this bravado came from. A defense. He wonders if that’s his fault. He does the only thing he can think of and catches the collar of Michael’s shirt, then his shoulder. 

“Guerin.” 

Michael looks skyward, his eyes refracting car taillights to become pale rings of light with dark centers. Then he looks at Alex’s hand. Then his face. “Whatever you think,” he says, “is not what I was gonna say. If you want me to drive you back, I will. But that’s not where I was going.” 

“Where are you going then?” 

Michael’s jaw works, a tendon under his ear shifting. “I’m not gonna lie and say that I wasn’t pissed off,” he says, carefully. Alex had been expecting that, and he couldn’t stomach a lie from Michael. Even after all this time. “But really, I was just glad.” 

“What?”

Alex expects a deflection. Instead, something in Michael’s face moves into tenderness. It catches him as surely as he’s caught Michael’s lapel. “You got to go do what the hell you wanted. You got out. I was so angry at myself for not doing the same thing, for so long. Every now and then I’d look you up to see what you look like. Where you are. Better than there. Am I not supposed to be glad about that?” 

His expression could break, if Alex touched it. 

Since then, he’s imagined doing it better. Doing it right. Telling the truth to Michael’s face. But he hadn’t had the luxury of choice. 

“I don’t know,” he says softly. He can feel the steady heat of Michael’s body, Michael’s shoulder still under his hand, every detail closer than it was before. He could be the only real thing in the universe, right now. 

“Now show me yours,” Michael says. His teeth catch his bottom lip on the last word.

Alex has never been great at saying the right thing when it matters. This matters, in the real and concrete way that something written down into melody matters as long as you keep playing it. 

“I think I’ve been waiting,” he says, steady as he can, which isn’t very, “to see your face in some bar somewhere for a long time.” 

There’s a silence and stillness, like the aftermath of throwing a punch. Then Michael is moving, and Alex is drawn in and it’s not a surprise, not a shock - he hates surprises - and he sees this coming or hopes it will, wants it, dreamed it in foolish hypothetical except that this is real. The stitching on Michael’s jacket, and his shoulders, and his knee knocking hard against the inside of Alex’s thigh and his strong hands. 

Michael kisses him. 

* * *

  
  


Alex kissed him back. 

There were a thousand reasons not to do it, starting with the fact that, despite the _ Been Abducted! Back in 5! _sign on the front door of the museum, someone might very well walk in on them at any moment, and ending with the fact that Alex hadn’t planned for this. He hadn’t expected Michael Guerin to show up at his work, drumming his fingers on the glass window and asking to talk in a tone Alex couldn’t parse. He hadn’t expected how much it stung, Michael leaning away from him when Alex thought he’d been given an invitation to move closer, and how all he could think about was the careful distance Michael had put between them since Alex had almost kissed him. He hadn’t expected to fall quite like he fell for the one kid in their school with a worse reputation than Alex himself. Or for a crush to make him quite so stupid. 

He really had not planned for Michael to kiss him like that - because straight boys didn’t kiss like that, something Alex knew from experience.

He knew, if it happened, that he’d like it. But gap between wanting and acting had been so wide that Alex had nothing in place to prepare for what the hell to do next. 

So he kissed him back.

Michael pulled back after a moment, his hands still at the back of Alex’s neck where he’d caught him all in a rush, the frantic kinetic impulse Alex admired so much but had never felt directed his way. Until now. Until this. Michael’s eyes stayed closed a second longer than Alex’s did and in that second Alex looked at him. Really looked. The long line of his nose and his half-open mouth that Alex had just been touching. Dayglo-green light bounced crazy colors off the warm brown of his eyes as they opened. He was nervous, Alex could tell. Alex had nothing to say to fix that.

Turned out, he didn’t have to say anything. Michael smiled, a crease in one corner of his mouth, and Alex couldn’t do anything but stare and move closer and hope Michael could feel what he felt. 

At the time, he was sure Michael did. Looking back, he was never certain - and the way he felt in retrospect was always so much more complicated than that moment of reciprocation. They’d made out in full view of a janky plastic alien his boss had nicknamed Samantha for some reason, and everything in Alex’s melody was tinted Dayglo green with starry skies behind it. And it had been almost reverent, sincere and so serious - until it was funny. They’d both started laughing, hadn’t wanted to stop kissing to keep laughing so hard done both, breathless and turned on. 

Michael left in a rush, promised to pick Alex up after his shift. Alex had knelt next to the plastic alien, touching his lower lip with his fingers. 

“Don’t be a creep, Samantha,” he said to the bulbous green doll, “and don’t tell.” 

Samanta, being a plastic alien, said nothing. And Alex, alone in the quiet museum, laughed. 

He had written about that, in the letter he eventually found the courage to finish. Not the plastic alien - but the laughter. Everything in the weeks after had happened with the weighted gravity of first times, a certain kind of sanctity. But they’d always laughed at it, too. Michael, laughing and ducking his head under the dashboard of his truck at police lights in the distance, ready to shine a flashlight into parked car windows. And Alex, laughing as the danger had passed, and then harder as he failed to push his own car seat back all the way so Michael hit his knee on the stick shift straddling his legs. Making out in the bed of the truck until Alex came in his pants, and laughing about it. Alex tugging on Michael’s hair so he moaned unexpected and loud, and how funny that had been, filling Alex up with hysterics and jittery want. 

They’d laughed the night Alex asked Michael if he wanted to fuck him. Because both of them were clueless really, and because he was nervous, and because he felt cared for and close. Up until the point where they’d been discovered, where everything went so wrong - 

He wanted to pull that part out of the memory as a whole and isolate it - Michael’s breathy laugh and his blown-out pupils and his fumbling surety. But the sound Michael made when he lowered himself in between Alex’s knees is all mixed into the sound he made when Alex’s father broke his hand. 

There is no separation. It’s all, or nothing. 

What Alex wrote down was how Michael had made him feel so safe. And how sorry he was that he hadn’t been able to do the same. 

Leaving the letter was the very last thing he’d done before leaving for good. He’d picked the lock of Michael’s truck and slid it onto the seat; the letter, a copy of a photograph, and a guitar pick. Nothing else felt meaningful. 

And then he left. 

He hadn’t written down where he was planning to go. He didn’t have a clear idea, but he wouldn’t have written it down, even if he had. 

* * *

Desert nights aren’t quiet, if you aren’t used to them. As soon as the sun goes down they fill up with subtle sounds, night birds and insects and the rustle of unseen movement in scrub brush and tall grass. Alex misses it whenever he gets too far away from the place he grew up, even though it’s so familiar that it fades into background noise, passing for silence. There’s a reason why he never moved out of the west for good. 

Right now, Alex is aware only of the whistle of the high wind, the rapid pounding of his own heart, and the sound of Michael breathing. It’s unsteady but consistent, and he feels every exhale. Alex needs his own breath back so, unwilling to move farther away than the space of a whisper, he tilts his head forward until Michael catches his face with his hands. 

When Alex can count his own breathing in its syncopation, he opens his eyes. Michael’s mouth is open and his eyes are wide and something through the line of Alex’s whole body aches. 

“Now’s the part where you tell me you’re married, or something,” Michael says, his following laugh fragile. 

“I’m not,” Alex says. “Are you?” 

“Would it matter if I was?” 

“Probably not.” That’s honest. “I’d feel bad about it for a minute.” 

“Oh, good,” Michael says, laughing again. At this angle, his face so close, he looks beautiful and a little manic. “Cause I wouldn’t, really. At all. So you’re doing better than me.” 

“Glad I’m not the only asshole here,” Alex says. 

He turns his mouth into Michael’s mouth. Michael makes a sound in his throat, something punched-out and painful, but he moves forward before Alex can back off, swallowing the noise and the space between them. His fingers tighten in the hair at the nape of Alex’s neck. When Alex presses back it’s a changed time signature, and he can’t hide the edge of his wanting, how desperate it feels. 

“Can I ask you,” he says against Michael’s mouth, “to drive me back into town now?” 

Michael stands. His hands find Alex’s hands and he pulls him to his feet so they’re level again, chin to chin and knee to knee. “Was hoping you would,” he says, looking at Alex’s mouth. 

“Back to your place,” Alex clarifies, every nerve aware of what he’s asking. “That’s a come-on.” 

“I got that.” Michael bites his lower lip, and then gestures towards the car door with his head. 

“Is this what you wanted,” Alex asks, “asking me out here?” 

“Yes,” Michael says, so fast and sure that Alex feels heat run right up his spine, “but I didn’t expect the rest of it. You’re surprising me this time.”

When he moves around to open the car door, Alex follows. 

* * *

The morning after the night that Jesse Manes broke Michael’s hand, Alex had failed to vanish right from the earth. So had his father, which meant there was no justice. He’d lain in bed for a long time, hearing his dad move around downstairs, and then knew he couldn’t push it any longer. 

Jesse watched him make coffee, put toast in the toaster. Like it was normal, like nothing had happened. Alex’s ribs ached, and his throat itched, and a burning hot ember of rage sat deep in his belly.

“Sit down, son,” Jesse said, in his granite countertop voice, “I have something to tell you.” Alex saw the end coming with a kind of slow-motion clarity. He was a fool to think he could escape it. 

But he sat, anyway. 

His father looked at him over his coffee cup, flat eyes in a stone face with a regulation haircut, and he said that he’d had a call from the Sheriff that morning. Rosa Ortecho was dead. 

He had to repeat himself, twice, before Alex reacted. The words simply didn’t make any sense in that order - Rosa, and dead. She was the most alive person Alex knew, larger than life and ready to say what she thought. 

“How?”

“She was in a car with two other girls,” Jesse said. “She ran herself off the road. I’m sorry, son. You knew her for a long time.” 

Alex saw that he was sorry. Somehow, in spite of everything else, he still had it in him to be sorry. Alex was grateful, and he hated it, and he hated himself and his father and the town and everyone in it. 

“You and I,” Jesse continued, after a moment, “need to have a conversation about your future. It can wait, considering the circumstances. But you know that what happened yesterday will not happen again under my roof. Tell me you understand me.” 

“Yes sir,” Alex said, tasting bile. 

“I don’t think I need to tell you what will happen if I see that boy again,” Jesse said. 

He didn’t. Alex knew, vividly now, what lines his father would cross to have his way. Just as clearly, he knew the shape of the coming conversation. Fall in line, or he gets hurt again. Maybe in a way he can’t get back up from. Jesse Manes didn’t have much of an imagination. He didn’t need to. 

Jesse stood, his chair scraping on the tile. “I’m going to the base,” he said. “I promised Jim we would lend our assistance in this difficult matter. Do not leave the house.” 

It wasn’t until his military-issue SUV pulled out of the driveway and quiet descended over the house that Alex let himself cry. Hard and fast and painful, for Rosa, and Liz, and himself, and Michael. Then he pulled himself together, wiped his eyes

He saw the ending coming through a pinhole, like a rabbit caught in a trap watching a hawk. 

But he had time. 

Just enough, as it turned out, to do what he had to do. 

* * *

The destination of their excruciating drive is Michael’s apartment, really a split-level condo with one shared wall and a little yard. There’s a big silver vintage Airstream parked in the lot and Michael points at it as he parks. 

“Graduated from the truck to that,” he says, “and now here.” 

They kept their hands to themselves on the drive, but not their eyes. Alex sees Michael’s face, and his own, reflected in the aluminum slide of the trailer; alien and distorted. In the windshield of the truck, his face is awestruck and pale. 

“I like it,” Alex says. The idea of four movable walls is appealing, personal compact space that can go anywhere. Michael’s hands are unsteady as he unlocks the front door, and he stands aside to let Alex in. 

It’s little and cluttered, papers strewn across a kitchen table and a stack of sneakers and boots at the door. Michael closes the door behind him and then they’re alone again. They might be the only people left on the whole planet. Alex can feel every inch of his body under Michael’s eyes, before Michael even reaches him. 

When Michael presses him back until his back hits the closed door, Alex lets him. Michael’s hands bracket Alex’s shoulders, then his elbows. He’s so close Alex is dizzy with the heat of him, one long thigh pressed against Alex’s knee up to the point where nerve endings stop. He wonders if Michael can tell the difference. His blood thunders inside his throat and his temples. He shudders and Michael is all teeth until he kisses him. 

When he pulls at Michael’s hair, right at the base of his skull, Michael gasps. Bares his throat. Turnabout’s fair play. 

They make it from the front door to the corner of the couch, Michael leading, his hands everywhere. Alex knocks into an ugly square table with his right foot and the sound brings him back to himself, even if Michael doesn’t notice it. He’s been trying not to think about that part of this series of events, but it’s becoming unavoidable. 

“Guerin,” he manages, turning his head, “hold on - “ 

There’s no neat segue into this, and Alex would rather see it coming than offer it as a shock once his pants are all the way off. 

“What’s wrong?” Michael’s face is all concern and he catches Alex’s shoulders gently, like he’s afraid he’ll run. 

“Let’s - “ Alex gestures uselessly around the room, eyes the couch - but he doesn’t want Michael to think this is a rebuff. “Let’s go - “ 

“Yeah,” Michael says, presses his mouth against Alex’s jaw. He walks them backwards and opens a door one-handed, flips on a lightswitch. His bedroom is just as crammed; books spill out of a bookshelf and laundry is piled on an ugly armchair in a corner. The bed’s not made. Michael, still not understanding, sucks on Alex’s earlobe. 

Alex puts his palm against Michael’s chest. “Guerin,” he says again, “hold on.” 

And Michael pulls back, looks at him again. “Something is wrong,” he says. 

Alex breathes in for four - holds it seven - out eight. “There isn’t a graceful way to slide this into conversation with strangers,” he says, “much less someone you’ve slept with before.” 

“What, you got a really bad tattoo? Bring it on,” Michael says, but he sounds unsure. 

Alex takes a deep breath, leans into that space between bitterness and honestly; without shame, facts are just facts. He still struggles with that. “You can be the judge of those,” he says, “but more things have changed than that.” 

Alex kicks off his shoes, watching his own feet rather than Michael’s face. His jeans are already unbuckled so he slides them down, tugging at the knees a little to get the fabric over his thighs. He sits to pull his left foot free, and then works the second leg of his pants down over the artificial limb. He folds them to occupy his hands for another second, then tosses them on top of his shoes. 

“We’re not going to be doing this one standing up,” he says, and he can hear how thin his own voice is. 

Michael moves all at once, sits down on the bed next to him. His eyes move down Alex’s body, and up again. “That’s new,” he says. His hands move over his own wrists. 

“I was in a pretty bad car wreck,” Alex says, before he can ask, “few years ago. Sorry, I just - didn’t want to go all Terminator on you without warning.” 

“I know,” Michael says softly, and Alex leans back to look at him fully. “Shoulda said something sooner, I guess, but there you were and you looked fine and, yeah, no way to gracefully bring that up. Sure.” 

“How?” 

“Small towns,” Michael says, “word gets around. Max is Deputy Evans, these days. He works for Sheriff Valenti the Second. So it got back to me.” 

“Oh, great,” Alex says, “definitely want to give everyone in my hometown one more reason to talk about me.” 

Michael doesn’t laugh. He drums his fingers against his own knees, eight good fingers and two busted ones. The grin, the pace he’d been setting are both gone. His eyes are serious. “He said you almost died.” 

Something catches in Alex’s throat. “Then,” he manages, “he was right.” 

“Alex,” Michael says, shaking his head. 

“I know,” Alex admonishes, “killed the mood like I shot it through the heart. Didn’t mean to - well, it’s hard to miss. That’s all.”

“Alex.” Michael says it on an exhale. Then he’s moving again, always moving first. His fingers follow Alex’s jaw and Alex can hardly bear to look at his face. 

“Michael,” Alex starts, unsure what he’s going to say next, if anything. He’s spared having to figure it out, because Michael tilts his face with the hand on his jaw, and kisses him. Sweetly, deeply. His tongue is in Alex’s mouth. He moves slow, almost cautious, and when Alex presses his mouth to the corner of Michael’s mouth he lets out a sound like a sob. 

Alex lets his eyes drop closed, lets Michael keep the pace - slow but not stopping. Michael kisses his face, his throat, the dip of his upper lip, the old scar on his forehead. His fingers follow his mouth and his left hand holds Alex’s head steady as it tips back. He touches Alex’s Adam’s apple, his chin, his bottom lip. His hand flat against the top of Alex’s spine. And now there are fingers tracing Alex’s lips, inside his mouth. 

He bites down. Not hard enough to hurt but enough to catch the ridge of Michael’s knuckle and send a message. He opens his eyes. Michael’s chest is rising and falling

“Jesus Christ,” Michael says. 

“Come here,” Alex says, against Michael’s knuckles, and then he’s pulling Michael forward as he falls back, fighting with the buttons on Michael’s shirt. Michael gets his own stupid belt buckle off and Alex slides the shirt over his shoulders until they can’t do both at once and then Michael knocks his hand aside to pull his jeans off all the way. He pushes Alex flat onto his back so he bounces against the mattress, slides his hand up his body. Alex holds his wrist so his hand follows Michael’s hand. He strokes Alex through his briefs, pushes his knees apart. Fingernails tap on carbon fiber.

“Can I take it off?” Michael’s hand follows the length of Alex’s thigh, above the prosthetic. 

“If you can figure out how,” Alex says, his voice already rough. He still has one layer of clothing on. He can’t remember the last time he’s been so turned on. 

“I’m good with my hands,” Michael says, and he sits back. Clever fingers move over the mechanism until the pressure gives, and then he’s setting it aside. He grasps Alex’s kneecap, the prickle of his unshaven jaw on the inside of his leg sending shivers up Alex’s whole body. It almost tickles. He laughs. Michael looks up at him and smiles, all teeth. 

“Come here,” Alex says again. He sits up and Michael pushes him back, knees on either side of Alex’s hips. They rock together, Alex running his hands up Michael’s arms, feeling the muscle there. His throat is warm, his mouth warmer when Michael licks the inside of his wrist, his palm, his pointer finger. He pulls at the waistband of Michael’s boxers with his free hand, notices they’ve got little spaceships on them, then starts laughing again. 

“Please tell me my dick is not that funny,” Michael shakes his head. He shifts to shrug his boxers down himself, presses both palms into Alex’s hipbones until Alex lifts his hips.

“Sorry,” Alex says, wiping his eyes. “Don’t move.” He grabs Michael’s knees, his waist. 

“Like this?” Michael strokes him; it takes Alex’s mind a minute to catch up to the fact that Michael is touching himself too. 

“Yes,” Alex says, and Michael braces himself on his shoulders until he’s ready; his shoulders shake with it and Alex tries not to move. It’s hard. He holds on to Michael’s elbows, feels the rough skin there with his fingertips. 

When Michael rolls his hips Alex swears, something ridiculous and filthy. Michael laughs low above him, so Alex moves. Michael throws his head back. 

“You look good,” Alex says, for some reason. 

Michael’s eyes show white all the way around, and he pitches forward with both of his elbows on the mattress on either side of Alex’s head. Alex tugs his hair again, gives himself as much leverage as he can with one leg to roll his hips into a rhythm. He wants to hear what Michael sounds like. He wants to get close enough that Michael will leave an imprint, something Alex can remember in the future. He can’t think past the next minute, and the next, Michael’s hot, open mouth against his throat and his irregular, panting breath.

He kisses him. He’s still kissing him when Alex comes. 

Afterwards, Michael shift off of him awkwardly and Alex lies on his back and catches his breath until the bed dips and Michael returns. He’s gotten a glass of water, and a beer. Alex sits up, pulls himself up to the head of the bed, and snatches the bottle rather than the glass. 

“You got better at that,” he says. 

Michael smirks. “I’d fucking hope so,” he says, “considering you practically had to walk me through it, the first time.” 

“I barely knew any better,” Alex passes the beer back and Michael scoots up too so they’re shoulder to shoulder.

“Really?” Michael turns so he’s on his hip, elbow under his hand. “Here was me thinking you were just being nice to me.” 

“I remember it being - “ Alex clears his throat. They keep circling back to that and he doesn’t want to but it sits like a shadow in the room. He’s never forgotten the sound of it, Michael’s laughter and then Michael’s scream. The crunch, right before. 

“Yeah,” Michael says, softly. They sit in silence for a minute, just breathing. Looking at each other. Alex wants to kiss him again, but he’s suddenly unsure exactly what Michael will do if he does. 

“So,” Michael says eventually, his eyebrows climbing up his forehead like they’re trying to escape, “see you again in the next ten years?” 

Alex sits bolt upright, like an electric shock. He almost stands straight up, forgets he isn’t wearing his leg, tips awkwardly by clutching the headboard until he can get his knee under him. 

“Get my leg,” he snaps, like an order. “If that’s what you think this is then get my leg and let me leave.” 

“Is it not what this is?” Michael has squared his jaw.

“Get my leg.” 

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Michael drawls, and he stands. His voice is casual but his body is wire-tense, the lean lines of his shoulders hard. Alex, unable to do anything else, hurls a pillow at him. It hits him on the side of the face and bounces to the floor. Michael stares at it. Alex stares at Michael. 

And then Michael’s shoulders fall. He pushes a hand over his face, and bends to pick up the prosthetic where he’d dropped it at the foot of the bed. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, haltingly. “I don’t know why I said that.” He sets the prosthetic down where Alex can reach it and then sits, heavily. 

“Bullshit you do.” Alex grabs the limb but doesn’t move to put it back on. He feels unmoored again, in a completely different way. 

“It’s not insane - “ Michael pauses, rubs his thumb into the corner of his eye, “ - not insane to think you might not wanna be here tomorrow.” His voice starts mean and ends small. “Gotta catch a flight, right?” 

Alex breathes through the anger that had risen in him, and thinks about consequences. “Come here,” he says, for the third time that night. Michael raises his head and then he does. Alex shifts so he’s on his side, his elbow underneath him. Michael mirrors him, his eyes wary. “That’s not what this is. I don’t really - “ he points between Michael’s bare chest and his own “ - do this kind of thing. Not with people I don’t trust.” 

“Slumming it with the groupies,” Michael says, and whatever humor is in his voice doesn’t meet his eyes. 

“If I ever have some, I’ll let you know. I’m pretty comfortable just as I am. You know,” Alex shifts a little closer, so his kneecap knocks into Michael’s kneecap, “I had the idea in my head that to make it, I’d have to make it big. Platinum record, name recognition, Coachella. Whatever. But that’s not really ever what I wanted. I just wanted to make music. Still do.”

“Sure,” Michael says. Alex has lost him, on purpose. “Good for you.”

“I haven’t done any of this on a whim,” Alex says. “I can’t blame you for thinking I might make a run for it, either. Kind of a bad track record. But I’m also not much of a runner, these days.” He laughs, weakly - or starts to. Before the sound leaves his mouth Michael kisses him.

Soft, open-mouthed. His facial hair burns Alex’s chin a little, not in a bad way. 

“I know,” Michael says, against his mouth. His eyes are closed, like this hurts. “I know you didn’t mean it. Didn’t want to.”

He opens his eyes again, and Alex cups his face with one hand. 

“I did want to leave,” Alex says, because this is important. “I mean, I had to, but I wanted to. For a long time. It was always simple, ‘til you.” 

“Why?” Michael says incredulously. “You always talked about it.”

“So did you.” 

“Things got complicated,” Michael says, his face shifty, “so I had to stick around for a while.” He doesn’t elaborate any further. 

“Things got complicated for me,” Alex says it back, “so I had to go a lot faster than I wanted to.” 

“What do you mean?” Michael says, and his voice drops into something delicate. 

“Because,” Alex says, and he doesn’t want to say it but he makes himself do it, “I never counted for the fact that it was going to hurt. That I was gonna hurt someone, leaving.” 

He had hurt Michael. Alex can see that. He knew it while he was doing it. But there’s something impactful in that. His father, as far as Alex can remember, never suffered consequences for any of the damage he did. 

They stare at each other from either side of the bed for a long moment. Alex wills himself not to blink, not to turn away. Then Michael clears his throat. 

“Want to see something?” Michael rolls over before Alex can answer, fishing around in the little table next to the bed. Alex takes the moment to admire the muscles in his back, his long spine and his ribs appearing and disappearing again as he shifts. He touches the line of three vertebrae with his hand, because he can. 

When Michael rolls back over, he’s holding something; a piece of paper. Lined notepad stationery with eight distinct creases in a grid, a sign it’s been folded and unfolded so many times that the paper has gone soft. It takes Alex a second to recognize it for that reason. 

When he does, he stops breathing. He has to force himself to start again. The expression on Michael’s face is trepidation. But when Alex reaches his hand out, he passes it over.

The very center of the page is tearing away, almost translucent. Alex unfolds it as reverently as he can. He knows what he’s going to find inside - his own handwriting, ink bleeding into the page. He doesn’t have to read the words to know what they say, because he remembers writing them so clearly. They come across bleary and rushed; he’d been full of elation, anger, fear - so much fear - as he’d scribbled them down. 

“You kept it,” he says, stating the obvious. 

Michael nods, jerkily. “Yeah.” 

“Why?” 

“I wanted to remember,” Michael says. “Even when it was horrible. I wanted to remember how it was.” 

And Alex is suddenly afraid he’s going to cry. 

“I never forgot,” he says firmly, tremulously, “even when it was horrible, I never forgot.” 

They move together at the same time, Alex holding the letter out of the way like it’s precious, catching Michael by the shoulder. Michael’s arms encircle his waist and cradle the back of his head and Alex presses his face into the warm space of Michael’s shoulder, the strong tendons there that shift and move as Michael holds him. 

“I missed you,” Michael says, mostly into his shoulder. Alex hears him anyway. 

Alex folds the letter along its soft creases, sets it out of the way. “I missed you too,” he says, and he kisses Michael like he means it. 

They move slow, hurry gone. Alex pulls his fingers through the fine curls above Michael’s temples and Michael’s tongue touches his bottom lip like an invitation. His eyes are dark. 

“Now’s probably a good time to tell you,” Alex says eventually, tracing Michael’s collarbone, “that I kind of wrote an album about you.” 

Michael’s head pops up, the languorous expression gone. “Really? Which one?” 

Alex almost just tells him. “Maybe you need to listen and find out,” he says instead.

“Jackass, what if I have?” Michael blurts, then closes his mouth with a snap. “I was gonna be cool about it.”

“Cool about what?” 

“Why do you think I just let you yank me into the bedroom?”

“Well, I thought it was because you wanted to fuck me.”

“I have at least one of ‘em on vinyl. The rest, uh, are on a shelf in the living room.” Michael winces, opens one eye. 

“That’s really sweet,” Alex says. “No, seriously! I mean it. People don’t really buy physical CD’s anymore. That’s nice.” 

Michael kisses his knuckles, swipes his tongue over them. 

“What does this mean, then?”

“Knowing you’re a groupie?” 

“Fuck off. Yeah. No. This.” That shadow again, in his eyes. Something Alex is going to have to work at. He doesn’t mind it. 

“I hope it means I can call you sometime,” he says, carefully. “We have a lot of catching up to do.” 

“Just a little,” Michael says, “so maybe more than sometimes.” 

“I want to do that catching up. I want to know everything about you now.” He feels silly saying it, too honest. But Michael’s smile is disarmed and real, so it fades fast. "Also you have to meet my dog."

"Oh, sure. Your dog." 

"She's the most important woman in my life," Alex says, which is a line he uses more often than he should and will keep using until it isn't funny any longer. 

"Can't believe I took my eye off of you," Michael says, "and you turned into a dog person." 

Alex rolls onto his back, stares at the ceiling. There's a bleached cow skull hanging on the bedroom wall across from the bed that he's just now noticing, and a string of those amber-bulb lights always found in craft breweries. The room is golden-hued, warm and safe. Outside, he can still just hear the whistle of the New Mexico wind. If he's going to spend the night he should probably say something about locked doors and leaving the lights on. He is going to spend the night. 

"Then don't," he says, staring upwards. 

"What?" Michael moves so he's looking down at him, his hair hanging into his face. Alex pushes curls behind his ear with one hand. They don't stay put. 

"Take your eye off of me." 

Michael doesn't smile. He nods, his eyebrows touching. "Okay," he says, like a promise. Then his expression breaks at all once and his smile is infectious. "I mean, might have to park the trailer in your front yard. Get some binoculars. Like the paparazzi."

"My neighbors will think you're selling kombucha out of it," Alex says. 

"What?"

Alex laughs, pushing Michael's curls aside again. "You have to come visit me in Austin," he says, and means it.

When Michael lies down he pulls Alex's arm around his shoulder. 

"You should play me some more Bob Dylan," Alex says, hushed. 

"You think Dylan is all I know?" 

"I like the classic stuff." Alex presses fingers along Michael's shoulderblade. 

"Hm," Michael says, making a noise in his throat that Alex can hear against his chest. He looks up at him. "Maybe later. We got time." 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> i might keep playing around with this world if anyone is interested in reading more. i definitely want to write about the alex/kyle grief-argument bro makeout sesh that i only alluded to in passing, because i am a simple woman & i care about rogue folk, mandolins, and best friends with a sexual history. thank you.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] everywhere on earth you go](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28561410) by [Podcath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Podcath/pseuds/Podcath)


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